Business messaging (e-mail, calendaring, contacts, tasks) is the short-listed core service for all businesses. E-mail goes down and the hallways reverberate, or these days more likely the open-plan office echoes with CEO level down asking what the …
Money and resources are thrown at keeping e-mail delivery humming along. Budgetary planning for messaging has adjusted, bean-counter pupils barely dilate when IT managers talk messaging costs.
Can you pick the moment when IT messsaging infrastructure and service delivery became a core competency and focus for your business? Are you aware your business, regardless of whatever it is you are actually meant to be doing, is now officially in the e-mail service provider business?
You’ve mastered the technically difficult and resource-shifting skills in messaging. You are savvy with mailboxes, mobile e-mail, archiving, server utilization, DAS/SAN/NAS storage, virus filtering, and spam filtering.
Why? What was it your business does again?
Not entirely fair of me to position increasingly superfluous messaging infrastructure in this light, when just a few years ago email hosting providers did’nt have the business features and integration compared to internally hosted Exchange and Lotus Notes servers. Nor did you have the bandwidth, or quite sensibly the urge to lead the way.
Still, the main point is to seriously evaluate SaaS solutions for messaging. Certainly business features and capabilities are now competitive with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.
Why run your sideline messaging service provider business any longer than absolutely neccessary?
Just saw on SBS a documentary from the UK titled “How to live to 101 without really trying”. The documentary introduced three locations - Okinawa, Loma Linda CA, and Sardinia, where people live longer than anywhere else on earth. In fact doctors have dedicated their lives to uncovering the secrets of their remarkable longevity.
Fascinating stuff even in the absence of any secret special sauce. Nope, no elixar with secret ingredients guarded by the locals.
Genetics are a biggie. Okinawans look to have an interesting twist on a certain gene. Other families we met during the documentary are notable for generation after generation of cheap public transport pass carriers who refused to shuffle off this mortal coil until well after quitting time. All the usual suspects play a part. Diet - eat both better and less, lots of sprinting up and down goat tracks, and offspring payback (ok made that last one up).
Also on the short list in all examples of delayed exit scenarios was stress management. While not as exciting a reveal as say genetic advantages from alien/Nephilim cozying up back in the day, it really connected with me.
Okinawans have a saying that translated to “don’t worry, it will work out”. The Loma Linda CA are Christians with a similar faith based attitude, and the Sardinians … not sure really, but they certainly looked relaxed with all those Italian reds.
It has always been a thing with me that professionally managed I.T. services dramatically reduces business owner and staff stress. Customer stress removal is an important indicator of success for me.
Once again, not that we need reminding - stress is a big deal, and stress management strategies are incredibly important.
Take your I.T. service & support business and add a whopping great dose of highly evolved best practices - all aligned around the single idea - lets fix everything wrong with yesterday’s model of reactionary break/fix I.T. services.
Named Bunch of Cowboys to bounce of the highly conservative systematic nature of I.T. Managed Services methodologies. That is a good thing by the way. I know it is an obvious clarification. You want your I.T. service provider to be diligent, responsive, reliable, highly skilled and experienced, lots of certifications, forward looking strategic planner, cutting edge but carefully conservative, with great integrity and killer service ethic. Its ok to be dull if you cover off these criteria and everyone is happy.
Only we are human and dull does’nt cut it if you’ve got to be these attributes everyday! So please welcome the new BIGDY business - Bunch of Cowboys I.T. Managed Services.
http://www.bunchofcowboys.com
I’m starting to see our cloud based utility computing future more as a fluid amorphous business rules-based moving target.
I’m thinking about the implications of ubiquitous fast bandwidth and virtualization working in concert to enable all of our personal and business information to be perpetually on the move.
If bandwidth becomes both widespread and super (sophisticated technical term for “very”) fast then there is no cloud! Just pervasive computing. The coverage area for access to and management of your information extends inside and outside your home and your business. The location of your information slips between internal (relative to you) and external nodes based on whatever criteria makes sense to you. Backup, your location, utilization thresholds, paranoia, whatever.
How do you think the large scale utility providers will manage utilization peaks and troughs for their web-based services? I’m imagining Vmware VMotion type technology on a grand scale. The dynamic migration of virtual machines to utility nodes able to supply SLA dictated CPU, IO, bandwidth, and memory for the expected performance.
There goes the original understanding of cloud computing, where your stuff sat somewhere in the cloud.
Not a lot of sitting going on I’d say. Your data is on the move.
Brandstreaming describes business use of “lifestreaming” and social media web services to distribute content, create brand experiences, and foster brand interaction to cultivate customer relationships . Looks like your web site, web destination, or web silo of any type is losing effectiveness, as web site visits dive in favour of experiencing your brand through any number of aggregated streamed experiences and interactions.
Over 53% of online content is consumed “off-site”
By “off-site” I’m referring to no-where-near the publisher web sites - the now clearly dated silo you attempt to draw visitors to in order to accomplish your branding objectives. In my previous post I asked if building your own web site was neccessary, pointing to social media destinations (such as Facebook Pages) which provide ready made web presence capabilities.
Now I’m finding out - odds are traffic is on the decline to any discrete destination on the web. Yep, the isolated silo where you’ve plastered your brand.
Customers and the social networking communities they inhabit are already online in big numbers and trending strongly up. You can be sure they are not hanging out at your business web site!
Actually Facebook Pages is sounding better all the time. At least it bundles integrated social networking functionality into your web presence, and your silo is at the epicenter of the action! The rest is brand honesty, motivations, and social media strategy.
When will businesses decide, why build a web site, lets just use Facebook Pages (or alternative)?
I’m wondering, with such excellent ready made online self expression vehicles (the top tier social networking sites). Do we need to build our own business web sites anymore?
Why not just use Facebook, and/or LinkedIn, and/or mySpace, and/or WetPaint, and/or Ning, and/or insert_appropriate_social_network…? Depending on who you are aiming your web presence at.
This is more than feasible when talking about the introductory “Hi and welcome. We are …, we do …, you will love us because …” component of all web sites. No matter how far we think we’ve come (nigh on post-web 2.0!?), let’s face it, every web site has a large and important “getting to know you” aspect to it - the brochureware. The sophisticated smarts provided by social networking sites arguably help you do this better, with more personality, and (this is positive) more revealed about you and your business.
What about other web site functionality typically required, like e-commerce, customer portals, and any web based applications unique to your business’s online presence? We can stay on theme here as well. Link from your presence to any number of web services to get the job done. Use Facebook Connect, or Google Friend Connect to keep it easy, secure, and feeling integrated.
We need a better way of describing what used to be called a web site. Strictly speaking you’ve now got an online “presence” / “address” / “new name needed please!”. It is not a “site” anymore.
